This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up for consideration for 2009.
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SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: New Technology / Next Generation
Rebuilding the World with Free Everything
Doc Searls, Linux Journal, Harvard Berkman Center
"’Free’ is the future of business. Steve Larsen says the world has more
than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall
challenge for a huge pile of building material. Linux Journal presents
a panel of creative hackers and business crafters to discuss
constructing the future." (Related: "The Six Kinds of Free" -ed.)
State of the Microformat
Tantek Çelik, tantek.com
Since microformats.org launched in 2005 and empowered every web author to easily add semantics to their HTML, adoption has skyrocketed. This panel will present the state of the microformats ecosystem, including popular sites, browsers, search engines and other tools enabling and building upon microformats.
Can Social Networks Thrive Beyond the Walled Garden?
Trent Adams, Matchmine LLC
"Social media sites pop up daily, offering new forms of communication. Signing up requires adding redundant profile data, and “friending” people all over again. OpenID, Higgins & other Data Portability techniques aim to ease the burden, but how will the social networks thrive without being ‘walled gardens?’"
Interest Networking, or: Death to the Super Poke
Nova Spivack, Twine.com
"Social networking is all about the connections between people. What we’re really moving towards are interest networks — a paradigm whereby people inform each other, gain insight, and interact with information. Connecting with other people is only the first step to collectively organizing, sharing and discovering content. From Del.icio.us to Twitter to FriendFeed to Twine, we’re seeing many examples of this new category of software, which are founded on social connections, but are centered around the topics we care about most."